Teaching Loneliness: One Method for Suffering

You weep. Your eyes, bruised plums, ache.
Your throat feels scraped and tender
as a spring bulb. You try to eat
but everything is flooded in salt.
You don’t bathe and the phone doesn’t ring
or it does. But even so, silence persists,
an empty stillness so dark it vibrates,
a hum blanketing you with wasps.

You’re alone. You have to take that in,
into your bones, divide it in four pieces,
one for each chamber of your heart.
You go over everything, sorting,
trying to remember. Or not to.
No one can say what’s true, what’s imagined.
Memories reel like drunks on a bender:
Oh, that night! The surf curled around you,
shimmering, silver as Christmas tinsel.

Exhausted, you lie down but you can’t sleep.
Your bed whirls, a fun house ride,
laughter raucous as gulls on the wind,
the sound billowing, diminishing.

Loneliness takes persistence:
A hole in the sand dug out
but always the waves wash in and in.
Soon you live for night.
You pace the threadbare carpet,
tears scalding your lips,
arms wrapped around you,
your world nearly soundless now
but for your own raspy whisper:
There, there. There, there.

*Nancy Powers received her MFA from University of Missouri St. Louis. She is a working journalist and a Springboard to Learning specialist teaching poetry to middle-schoolers in the St. Louis Public School. Her poems have appeared in PMS (PoemMemoirStory), Melic Review, Fugue, Fan Magazine, Small Spiral Notebook New Harvest Anthology: St. Louis Jewish Writers and others.